The Faux Conspiracy Against Springsteen

Down With Tyranny! has his thong in a bunch today because he suspects the evil radio conglomerate Clear Channel is not playing the new Springsteen album. The rationale is that Springsteen wrote an album critical of Bush, Clear Channel is a huge corporation and is chummy with the President (or at least doesn't want to piss him off) and as a result, you have no "Boss" on the air.

He's a bit exercised and cites as evidence that this is a trend the way that Clear Channel handled the Dixie Chicks incident in which the inane Natalie Maines went off on the President in London during a live show.

Here's an excerpt:

Republican radio network Clear Channel, a monopoly in many cities and a dominant player in most of the rest, isn't interested. Is it because Springsteen has been an outspoken campaigner for Democrats and progressives? Clear Channel has taken a political stand with its programming in the past. Just think back to their boycott of the Dixie Chicks. Oh, no... not way back, just back to when they released their most recent album. Despite being one of the top 10 best-selling American albums of the year-- across all genres and demographics-- radio studiously ignored it. There were maybe half a dozen country stations that even played it at all. What Clear Channel did to the Dixie Chicks is a watertight case for the need to break the media companies up into a thousand pieces. (John Sununu disagrees; he's pro-censorship.)

First, the links don't show that Clear Channel had any complicity in not playing the Dixie Chicks music. Both links refer to Cumulus and a concerted effort by them to not play the Dixie Chicks but says nothing of Clear Channel. So right off the bat, the theory of a pattern is shot out of the water. The Fox News coverage is a rumor and it is highly inconclusive as to whether or not there's any merit to it. In fact, DWT in an update conradicts himself:

The Fox News report I linked to isn't exactly right. Some Clear Channel stations are indeed playing it, although mostly Clear Channel stations with independent-minded programmers like KBCO in Denver. Overall, Clear Channel isn't giving it the kind of exposure a #1 record would normally get.

In the immortal words of Gilda Radner's Emily Litella: "never mind."

What liberals fail to realize and it is a huge issue is that companies cannot censor anyone, only government entities can. Clear Channel and Cumulus are private companies and have the right to play whatever they wish whenever they wish. They will suffer the economic consequences of their actions just as Maines did when she belittled Bush. It's quite simple, words have consequences and Maines moaned and whined because she spoke without a forethought of what those consequences would be. The words I'm writing today have consequences and that's why I choose my words carefully. It wasn't even so much what Maines said--it was actually pretty inoccuous stuff compared to what flows out of the left-wing gutters nowadays, it was the fact that she said it overseas during a time of war and it struck people who love America as unpatriotic. I imagine quite a few live in Texas.

Further evidence of the utter inanity of the post was in evidence a few years ago when both System of a Down and Green Day put out albums severely critical of Bush and the War on Terror and both were played incessantly on Clear Channel stations.

Lastly, radio stations like Clear Channel and others are not the behemoths they once were. I never listen to local radio, only Sirius and downloaded music on my MP3 player. The only people who buy CD's anymore are old farts who evidently listen to Springsteen. The money is made in downloads and live shows as has been shown by band after band. The record business is dead with respect to selling anything in stores, as Radiohead showed with their recent Internet-only release, if you can't get around the big radio stations and get your music heard, you're either an idiot or your music sucks. I think Springsteen is an excellent musician (and I was raised in New Jersey so to not think so is sacrilege) so the former is probably the case.

For my thoughts on the death of rock go here. Down With Tyranny gets a woody everytime an anti-Bush CD comes out and I guess I have the responsibility to smack some friggin sense back into him from time-to-time. Previous posts on this subject here.